Congress and state legislatures disburse emergency funds, which are then offset in budgets with cuts to social services and public spending. We are seemingly in a permanently reactive mode, with money often going to rebuild “back to normal” as though this is proof of bravery in the face of tremendous uncertainty. Recovery from previous disasters, like Hurricane Katrina, has had regressive effects, heightening the disparities between rich and poor and perpetuating systemic racism.

We should plan recovery and rebuilding projects that address local poverty and exclusion, rather than line the pockets of developers. We should commit expenditures to the kinds of projects that mitigate climate change, like clean energy and public transportation. And we should strengthen our safety nets so that when the next storm’s victims are picking up the pieces, they are not also worried about job insecurity, rising health care costs and precarious retirements.

It’s very hard to understand just how it is that our cultural norms change over time. It’s a bit easier to see how much they change, but we don’t have reliable data that goes back very far.

The staff here at NobodyisFlyingthePlane likes to think of the changes we go through in cultural norms as a natural part of our evolution as a species. It’s not biological evolution, we haven’t meaningfully changed in all of recorded history. But in that same period we have gone through an enormous cultural evolution, and from the looks of it we have a long way yet to go.

Changes in our shared values are important indicators of this evolution. Changes that occur within the span of a single lifetime are hard to adapt to. All of the bursts of evolution in our views on racism have been very violent. This is a tough value for humanity to swallow. Some humans are better adapted to accept changes. Some of these changes run contrary to our biological adaptations, especially our small group and tribal affinities. Views on race, ethnicity, and even nationality hit these walls often.

Humans adapted to survive better as groups than as individuals. The size of those groups varied with the availability of resources. When resources become scarce group affinities play an important role in the allocation of those resources.

Our species is deep in the process of redefining and reconfiguring traditional group affinities and the manifestations of racism and xenophobia we are seeing are a natural result.

We have a lot more skirmishes ahead of us in the culture wars, but the consequences are not trivial and they can’t be viewed simply as old values vs. new values.

The essence of what drives these battles is the conflict between egalitarian views and limited resources. The majority of humanity seems to have agreed that all humans have equal worth or value, but we haven’t yet agreed how to distribute resources in a manner that reflects that equality.

So long as we are still competing for resources we are going to form group affinities. We’re biologically coded to do so. Racism, xenophobia, and other us vs. them battles are losing favor as a means to define our group affinity. While they endure we need to look beyond just changing opinions about them. To really bring about an egalitarian society and celebrate this change in humanity we need to look at our systems of resource allocation and seek to change our economies to reflect our cultural values.

Today in the United States, sweeping majorities of the public say they support fair housing laws and the ideal of integrated schools. Nine in 10 say they would back a black candidate for president from their own party, and the same say they approve of marriage between blacks and whites. That last issue has undergone one of the greatest transformations in polling over the last 50 years. In 1960, just 4 percent of Americans approved.

When norms of acceptable behavior and speech start to shift, it can disturb the shared beliefs, values and symbols that make up our culture. “It’s really all of those things that we’re watching right now — they’re all up for discussion,” Ms. Sobieraj said.

When norms change, the highly educated tend to adopt them the fastest. And when political leaders agree, those attitudes spread through the population the more information people have about them. When political leaders don’t agree, attitudes tend to polarize (for example, liberals say climate change is human-driven; many conservatives say that it’s not).

Cash bail is among the many reforms needed in the criminal justice system. In many cases it’s a gateway to a life of crime as the defendant’s life destabilizes while they sit in jail unable to pay.

The system remains as it is because of a strong industry lobby to keep the profits flowing.

To be perfectly clear here we have a system that negatively impacts a significant number of lives just so an infintely smaller number of rich people can get richer.

The harm that even short-term detention can cause is profound. Jobs are lost, children are removed and lives fall apart, setting off even more of the instability that is itself a predictor of crime.

The harm that even short-term detention can cause is profound. Jobs are lost, children are removed and lives fall apart, setting off even more of the instability that is itself a predictor of crime.

The growing consensus against cash bail cuts across party lines, and includes law enforcement leaders, prosecutors, defense lawyers, the courts and religious leaders.

The only defender of the system, it seems, is the industry that profits from it. States and localities around the country have begun imposing long overdue reforms to their bail systems. But the multibillion-dollar bail-bond industry, which charges defendants to guarantee their appearance in court, is pushing hard in the other direction. The Times reported Monday on two lawsuits filed in federal court in New Jersey over the summer challenging a new state law that essentially eliminates money bail. Another suit, in New Mexico, challenges that state’s Supreme Court’s new rules governing bail. The industry is also fighting federal bail reform legislation.

But the profit motive can be a powerful bulwark against the truth.

The increase, largely during the 1990s and 2000s, happened as the politically influential bail-bond industry flexed its muscles and almost no one paid attention to the growing inequality and unfairness of the system.

Democrats ignore important issues like economic inequality at their own peril. Racism is important but it’s forest for the trees issue. More persons of color will benefit in the short and long run from addressing economic equality issues than by fighting white supremacists. Bannon and Trump get it and they bamboozled their followers into believing they would improve the economy. Of course history will show they didn’t improve economic opportunities for people of any color and they made racism popular again, but Democrats can give them license to do more of the same by chasing identity politics.

“The longer they talk about identity politics, I got ’em,” he said of Democrats. “I want them to talk about racism every day. If the left is focused on race and identity, and we go with economic nationalism, we can crush the Democrats.”

But there are many more voters in Trump’s camp who still consider themselves Democrats. Some live in the much-discussed zone of despair, places where opportunities for people without a college degree are few, and the opioid epidemic rages. These folks are persuadable, if the message is economic hope — something that Obama understood, and Hillary Clinton never did.

This doesn’t mean that Democrats should not speak out when a cop kills someone for driving while black. Nor does it mean that Democrats should not join with progressive institutions — the military and forward-looking corporations among them — when Trump turns back the clock on transgender rights, or equal opportunity.

But you can’t bang just one drum. Trump has said demonstrably racist things many a time, from his birther obsession to his taco bowl tweet. He still won, “on a straightforward platform of economic nationalism,” as Bannon noted.

“As long as Democrats fail to understand this, they will continue to lose,” he said.

So, even though Trump now threatens to shut down the government that he runs over his insane and unpopular border wall, even though he’s told 1,000 verifiable lies since he’s been in office, his horrid character will not be enough to help the forces of good.

Like this:

A great explanation of what politcal moderates are and why we need more of them.

Moderates do not see politics as warfare. Instead, national politics is a voyage with a fractious fleet. Wisdom is finding the right formation of ships for each specific circumstance so the whole assembly can ride the waves forward for another day. Moderation is not an ideology; it’s a way of coping with the complexity of the world. Moderates tend to embrace certain ideas:

There is a way for energy companies to thrive in the renewable era. This Dutch company is repositioning itself as an energy service provider. They don’t sell kilowatts. They sell kws + services for consumers.

Eneco has sought to provide new services to customers — and, in doing so, to enter new sectors, like the charging of electric vehicles and the repair of solar panels.

“What we are trying to do is switch from selling a pure commodity to selling energy as a service.”

For instance, Eneco owns Jedlix, an electric vehicle charging unit, which has partnerships with Tesla and BMW and allows car owners to recharge their vehicles inexpensively when there are large supplies of renewable energy on the grid. Jedlix sometimes even pays them to do so.